Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
Check out my other blog at taboo-truths.blogspot.com

Friday, December 21, 2012

With the establishment media's (and
thus your) attention absorbed by the Newtown, CT school massacre and
political campaign for gun control as a convenient distraction, the
Department of “Justice” has taken the opportunity to inform Paula
Broadwell's lawyer that no charges will be filed against her.
(Broadwell was the mistress and hagiographer of former media darling
General David Petraeus. Oh, how that fickle establishment media turns
on people! So like a catty high school clique! Conveniently, Petraeus'
story is that his sexual affair with her only began after he left
active service in the military- he's still a reserve officer- meaning
he wouldn't be exposed to military prosecution for the “crime” of
adultery. I suspect he's lying about that.)

Apparently emailing someone that you
can make them “go away” isn't a scary enough "death threat" to
warrant a Federal trial. (Unless you're a leftist, of course. Then
anything goes.) But it was enough of an excuse to overthrow the head
of the FBI's hated rival agency, the CIA.

There has been some scuttlebutt that
elements within the CIA helped oust Petraeus. Maybe someday we will
find out.

One thing the whole affair underlined
yet again is the fact that the FBI outranks the U.S. Congress. When
the Petraeus affair hit the news, we heard whines from the likes of
Senate “Intelligence” Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-
CA), complaining that they weren't notified.

In other words, the FBI, a secret political
police agency, outranks the national legislature of the U.S.

You don't see the secret police running the show in places like China! In most countries, the government controls the secret police, not the other way around. Here, the secret police agencies are states within a state.

And how's this for cheek: just days later, the then-head of the FBI, the execrable professional oppressor Louis J. Freeh, had the nerve to attack Congress for underfunding the FBI. And they ate that crap instead of demanding his head on the spot.

How pathetic American politicians really are. But they're great at imposing longer and longer prison sentences on us who resist them, or smoke pot. Or letting music corporations imposes fines iin the hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading a few dozen songs. (An actual case.) Or immunizing the phone companies that aid and abet massive, warrantly NSA spying. Or locking up people for life without trial (you have to call them a "terrorist" first).

What, finally, can you say about such a bunch of pompous, cruel weasels?

Monday, December 17, 2012

The U.S. is the world's most repressive
nation by at least three measures.

First, the U.S. has the world's highest
rate of incarceration. One in 100 adults is imprisoned in the U.S.
(Currently 2.3 million souls.) With 4% of the world population, the
U.S. holds 25% of all the prisoners on earth.

Secondly, in terms of surveillance of
the populace, no other nation on earth collects every single
electronic and voice communication of every person who uses a phone
or Internet communication method, as the U.S. does. (The NSA has a
gigantic new computer center in Colorado to store all the data and
paw through it with supercomputers and thousands of military
personnel.)

Thirdly, the U.S. does the most
thorough and sophisticated cross-linking of computerized databases,
with search and surveillance software. State motor vehicle records,
credit bureau databases, bank records, safe deposit box owners,
utility and rental records, court records, arrest records, and on and
on are all open to the police and secret police to search at will
without any warrant requirements. And of course numerous other
government records on all levels of government are tied in to this
massive spy system. The FBI, NYPD, and others employ facial
recognition technology to search photos in driver's license and
passport records, among others. Video of faces from thousands of
surveillance cameras is part of this massive surveillance blanket.

The U.S. is also one of the worst in
terms of how draconian its punishments are. Coincidentally the NYTimes ran an article on a few victims of mandatory life
sentences for minor drug “crimes” after I wrote most of this
essay.

As a follow up, I will discuss some of
the viciousness of the U.S.'s punitive policies towards those unlucky
enough to be labeled “criminals.” (Mainly racial minorities with
darker than white skins, and the poor. And political prisoners, of
course.)

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Well, it looks like the jig is up for
poor Chavez, the socialist President of Venezuela long reviled by the
U.S. media and Government.

I had a bad feeling about this from
when it first became known that he was seriously ill, in June 2011.
After multiple surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy, this latest
relapse bodes ill for his survival.

Thequestion left hanging is: did the
U.S. do him in with one of the potent carcinogens in its arsenal of
poisons?

That will be devilishly hard to ever
resolve definitively one way or the other.

The possibility must be kept open, as
a possibility. We can neither say it is a fact at this point, but nor
should it be dismissed as “paranoia.” Only a naïve fool ignorant
of history would call it paranoiac or implausible, given the
sinister, evil history of the U.S. Government.and its malevolent arm,
the CIA.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

According to their websites, Petraeus' paramour, Paula Broadwell, sent threatening emails to another woman, who went to the FBI. Very foolish. Too bad other "news" outlets couldn't find that out. (Of course, Newsmax isn't actually a news site.)

There are a number of ironies in the career downfall of CIA boss General David Petraeus. A darling of the establishment, top man in the imperialist enforcement apparatus of military and "intelligence" agencies, a man credited with victory in Iraq (tamping down the insurgency enough to hand the mess over to a Shiite semi-dictatorship), tweaking the war in Afghanistan with a nouveau "hearts and minds" strategy of "protecting civilians" (minimizing their casualties at NATO's hands, a good idea on practical political and military grounds, not to mention moral ones, which doesn't really matter to these guys even though they pay it lip service) and until a few days ago heading the CIA, which is waging more and more aggressive "paramilitary" operations; his services are now irrationally lost to the system. This has occasioned moaning and hand-wringing among politicians and commentators. (Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opined that he should have stayed on, for example.)

The secret police state that is America today has chewed up a top apparatchik in its maw. The FBI was spying on emails between him and his lover. No one in the establishment questions the propriety of this. As a result, his career was finished.

Why? The potential for blackmail, we're told. But the reason that potential exists is because of the repressive, antiquated, unrealistic official sexual mores of the establishment culture. Lifelong monogamy strikes me as unrealistic. What man really is turned on by the same woman for decades? It's absurd. And sexual desire by its nature has innumerable objects. We are naturally attracted to more than one other person. Too bad the establishment rejected the sexual revolution of the counterculture. I suppose there is poetic justice in the fact that the repressive mores and oppressive secret police state they impose on others should bite themselves in the ass for once. Petraeus was one of their superstar apparatchiks. It's irrational to toss him overboard for this- he certainly can't be blackmailed over it now!

Leave it to the right wing tabloids of New York City to have their cake and eat it too, moralistically tut-tutting while pruriently wallowing in the "scandal." Australian billionaire reactionary media mogul Rupert Murdoch's NY Post (a rag with a special place in his heart, which is why he keeps it going year after year, even though it loses millions of dollars a year) screamed on p. 1 Saturday, Nov. 10, "CLOAK AND SHAG HER" "CIA boss Petraeus quits over affair." The Post cites the demented right wing website Newsmax as saying an FBI source (so many arch reactionaries inside the secret police! they leak to Newsmax!) says the FBI had been intercepting Petraeus' emails since spring "after it mistook one exchange with his girlfriend as a reference to corruption." Wait, so why did it start spying on his emails? Adding to the confusion, the Post asserts that the affair "prompted an FBI investigation over fears that Broadwell had accessed the general's e-mail, possibly gaining access to classified information." But how did the FBI find out about the affair? And why is it investigating people for sexual affairs? What made them think she had accessed his emails? Why didn't they go to Petraeus at that point?

You know what I think? I think this is a case of the FBI-CIA rivalry rearing its head. They've been feuding ever since the CIA was created. J. Edgar Hoover despised the CIA from the beginning.

The paramour, Paula Broadwell, is a West Point grad who hung out with Petraeus in Afghanistan and authored a hagiography of him. (She was merely following in the footsteps of establishment "journalism" which similarly lionized him.) She claims to have served from 2003-6 as liaison officer with "the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force." (NY Post. The Post apparently doesn't know there's more than one such task force, set up in major cities with police departments. Also what agency was on the other side of the liaison?)

On to the other New York City tab, the NY Daily News (owned by Canadian Jewish real estate mogul Mortimer B. Zuckerman). Same day (Saturday), p. 1 "Gen. Betrray U.S." across the top. Oh please, so he's a traitor? Really, Mort? (That's a low blow especially from an ardent Zionist like Zuckerman, about whom it's not a stretch to say Israel comes first.) Then splayed down the page are the words "Caught In the Act." The C-I-A in those words are in big red letters- clever, huh? What creative geniuses work at these mass propaganda sheets! Inside another clever headline: "KISS & INTEL." Man, what imagination at work! On their website, the top headline today reads

See what I mean about titillating the readers while simultaneous acting morally offended?

Amid all the hand-wringing by the politicians and pundits over the loss of services of this professional warrior, I predict there will be nary a word questioning the secret police surveillance state, the destructive rivalries between different organs of the repression apparatus (aka "the intelligence community") or the hypocritical, unworkable, puritanical sexual mores they officially adhere to- in a popular culture drenched with blatant sexual titillation and invitations to promiscuity. (I have no problems with honest promiscuity, as opposed to "cheating:" i.e. pledging monogamy while secretly betraying the pledge. One should not deceive one's mates, lovers, soulmates. Especially since sexual diseases are an issue, not to mention trust and emotional fealty, which is connected to sex for many, especially for women.)

I guess we'll hear from some feminists who will see this as a powerful man "exploiting" a "vulnerable" woman. Nonsense. This isn't a starry-eyed intern manipulated by a clever Clinton. This woman is a mature adult (married with children), with a career, who obviously was willing to make love with a man she admired and considered a "mentor" (media accounts say).

Tell you one thing: if I were in the CIA, I'd be pissed at the FBI. But Petraeus was an outsider, so I guess they don't care so much. Still, they should.

Friday, November 09, 2012

The Iranian theocratic regime has just beaten to death a 35
year old blogger, Sattar Beheshti, in prison, according to Reporters Without
Borders. He was being persecuted for blogging things the regime didn’t like,
which it considered a Threat To National Security. (The standard excuse of all governments when they persecute people, along with Threating Public
Order.) The BBC reports that this is the 17th prisoner beaten to
death in the regime’s prisons in 9 years.

Whatever one thinks of the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear
program, the regime itself is repressive, and totalitarian in its ideology.
Recall the violent repression of the protests against the last, fixed election,
which reelected President Ahmadinejad. (Ahmadinejad is more and more impotent
these days. He can’t even make personnel appointments or keep his own people
out of prison! His final term ends in Spring 2013. Yet we keep hearing
references to “Iranian threats to wipe Israel off the map” which apparently
refer to his past inane spoutings, despite the fact that he doesn’t call the
shots.) It would be a blessing for the Iranian people to be free of it. (What’s
the U.S. plan, to impose the now erstwhile
terrorist MEK on Iran?) Nevertheless, the Iranian regime and Israel are
obviously enemies- especially since Iran supports Hezbollah and Hamas,
anti-Israeli organizations.

Coincidentally, the U.S. announced sanctions against more
Iranian Government targets, including the communications minister and the
Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance [i.e. Propaganda and Indoctrination].
Ironically, unnamed U.S. Treasury and State Department officials told the New York Times that these officials are culpable
for censoring news media, jamming satellite broadcast, disrupting Internet
activities, and “intimidating and detaining journalists” in the NY Times’ words. [“Iran Fired onMilitary Drone In First Such Attack, U.S. Says,” 11/8/12.] Except for the first of
those, the U.S. does all of that too. In fact, it goes farther than these
particulars against Iran, killing
journalists, especially ones from Aljazeera (in Kabul and Baghdad), but also
from Reuters, a Spanish journalist killed in the U.S. Army attack on a Baghdad
hotel, and others.* (The Baghdad hotel was well known as a location for
journalists, as we know from a former NSA worker interviewed on DemocracyNow.) [However, the
theocratic regime of Iran has killed at least one journalist in custody; odd
that it wasn’t mentioned by the U.S. officials and NYT.]

One Aljazeera employee was imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for
several years while he was interrogated on Aljazeera’s inner workings, and
promised to be released only if he’d be a U.S. spy inside Aljazeera.

*On the matter of intimidation of journalists, leaving aside
whether Julian Assange qualifies as a journalist, increasingly the U.S. is
trying to obtain journalists’ confidential sources via Grand Jury inquisitions,
and seems to be inching closer to using the so-calledEspionage Act against reporters who report
whistleblower-obtained secrets. The secrets the high officials choose to plant
anonymously in organs such as the NY Times are treated differently, of course,
those officials are free to keep committing the same “crime” of divulging “classified
information” with impunity. And in a lawsuit brought against the Carl
Levin-authored and Obama-signed provision of the most recent Military Money Act
allowing imprisonment without charges of U.S. citizens labeled “terrorists” in
military gulags for indefinite periods, journalists and others made the point
that they were intimidated in their work by this. The Federal District Judge
agreed, but of course the Obama regime is appealing. So different from Bush!
Lucky thing Romney lost, too!

Friday, November 02, 2012

Doesn't look like it. Broadcast media focused unrelentingly on the trivia of each moment's damage, hardship, and chicken soup poured on by politicians. Only mention I heard of the bigger picture was from scientists on Bloomberg's radio (figures, as he isn't in the denialist camp), and even that was a tiny fraction of airtime. Thus we are at the mercy of media oligarchs' personal attitude. Apparently the consensus within the corporate elite is to go along with the position of the fossil fuel extraction industry. (As always, fanatical noisemakers for hire are readily available to shout down reason.)

In brief, global warming makes hurricanes worse because hurricanes derive their energy from ocean heat, and the oceans are warming. Secondly, since the level of the oceans have been rising due to ice melting from glaciers and the poles (especially the north), that means higher surge levels and more flooding.

But just as no massacre shakes the ironclad two-party consensus against gun control, it seems no natural calamity can shake the climate change denialist consensus. Or not so much a consensus, but just that those who no better have no stomach for a fight with the fanatics of the Right.

Friday, October 19, 2012

The Democrats have a never-ending scam they trot out every 4 years when they're running their man
(maybe a woman, someday; unfortunately it will probably be another Clinton) for
President. They fill people with dread, using scary stories of what the
Republican Bogeymen will do when they "take over" and get to make
appointments to the Supreme Court. Their very subtle argument runs along the
lines of this:

“JUST ONE (or two or three)
APPOINTMENTS WILL SHIFT THE BALANCE OF THE COURT!! THEN YOU'LL LOSE YOUR RIGHT
TO ABORTION!” the Democrats and their auxiliaries screech, to induce
people to go vote for them.

Excuse me? A few points are in order here. Reactionaries have been
controlling the Supreme Court since Nixon's day. In fact, except for the
aberrational Warren Court, the Supreme Court has always been deeply reactionary and hostile to human rights. And
none of the 5-person majority reactionary bloc on the Court is about to retire.
So there is NOTHING hanging in the balance because there already is a rightwing majority and there’s been one for over a
decade.1

More tellingly, and this really exposes the Democrats as deeply
cynical con artists, the present membership of the Court is DUE TO THE
DEMOCRATS as much as it is to the Republicans.

Take these very glaring examples of despicable Democratic
complicity with the GOP in creating andimposingon us the arch-reactionary Court
of today.

Antonin Scalia, a horribly fanatical rightist, was confirmed by
the U.S. Senate 98-0 in 1986. And I remember that it was obvious at the time
how awful he was- his confirmation made me nauseous. In what eventually turned
out to be ironic, and poetically just, then-Senator Al Gore was one of those 98
culprits. It serves the bastard right that Scalia was one of the five who stole
the 2000 election from Gore, crushing his lifelong dream and ambition to become
President. But don't cry for Gore: that made member of the nomenklatura is now filthy rich, with a net worth of around
$100,000,000. That's one hundred million, in case all those zeroes confused
you. [Sources:Forbes,
CNBC,Fast Money, and many
others.] [The Gang of Five GOP operatives on the Supreme Court who stole the
election were Scalia, Rehnquist, Thomas, O’Connor, and Kennedy.]

Another of the GOP Gang of Five that stole the 2000 election from
the hapless Democrats, Sandra Day O'Connor, was confirmed by 99-0, in 1981, in
yet another fine example of "bipartisanship," i.e. the ruling
political class marching in lockstep to oppress us. O’Connor started as an apparatchik of the extremely rightwing
Arizona Republican Party.

The lifelong nasty GOP apparatchik and Nixon hatchet man, William
Rehnquist, another product of the Arizona GOP (that also gave us that fanatic
avatar of the Right, Barry Goldwater) was confirmed first for Associate Justice
and later as Chief Justice (under fascist butcher Reagan) by 2 to 1 margins by
the Senate. This despite the fact that he cut his political eyeteeth by
suppressing the votes of Latinos in Arizona, confronting and intimidating them
in polling stations and challenging their right to vote. Then he lied about it
later in his Senate confirmation hearings. That's ok; politicians are very
forgiving of liars since they're liars too, so they have a natural affinity and
sympathy for fellow liars. (Unless they're enemies of the U.S. Then they
denounce them in high moral dudgeon.) Rehnquist was Chief Justice and part
of the 5-4 majority in the Bush v. Gore Florida recount case.

Yet another career reactionary operative, Chief Justice John
Roberts, was given a “bipartisan” stamp of approval, voted in by 78-22, a 3.5
to 1 margin, in 2005.

Kennedy, an alleged "swing" vote on the court who helped
the GOP steal the 2000 election, was confirmed in 1988 in another squeaker,
97-0. But Samuel Alito was given the green light by a less impressive 58-42, in
2006. (Well would ya look at that! Some Democrats actually voted against putting our fates in the hands
of a reactionary, for a change!)

And in what may be the worst example in the modern era of the
Democrats’ complicity in the evil of giving so much power over our lives to
vicious reactionaries, one that needs special emphasis (particularly since the
bourgeois establishment has done such a bang-up job of consigning it to the
memory hole) is the case of the perverse (in several ways) Clarence Thomas, a
man who seems to hate blacks as much as a typical Southern white racist. (That’s
one way he’s perverse. Another way is, of course, his history of vulgar sexual
harassment. Then there’s his image of himself as an 18 century member of the
American landed gentry. His so-called “judicial philosophy” is nothing but
nostalgia for his imaginings of how swell it must have been to be among their
number, transliterated into legalistic mumbo-jumbo.)

At the time of Thomas’ ascension to the high court from hack GOP
apparatchik (1991), the Senate was controlled by the Democrats. And the
Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who oversaw the confirmation
process and very public hearings, was none other than one Joe Biden, the
current Vice President of the United States. Beneath his slaphappy political
goofball exterior, Biden is one venal, malign fellow. He’s especially big on
repressive legislation, including of the “drug war” variety. (It was his idea
to make club owners criminally liable for Ecstasy use on their premises. Hark,
what Herald of Freedom Joe Biden is!)

Biden ran interference for Thomas to get him onto the high court
despite Anita Hill’s revelations. It was Biden who blocked other witnesses who
could corroborate Thomas’ behavior. And it was Biden who spread the word among
the Democratic Senators that Hill was a liar, thus providing the crucial margin
for the reactionaries’ 52-48 victory. You see from that margin what a close-run
thing it was. The GOP couldn’t have done it without Biden.

We know this from the scrupulously documented, devastatingly
detailed book, Strange Justice: The
Selling ofClarence Thomas, by
Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. Abramson has since risen in the bourgeois
hierarchy to become editor di tutti
editors, the boss of all editors at the NY
Times. So she has no excuse for not knowing better, and not assigning
articles to remind people.2

So in fact, in most instances anywhere from few to no Democratic
Senators vote against the extreme rightwing nominees the GOP puts forth to pack
the court with. And Obama is so uninterested in lifting even a pinkie to resist
the reactionary packing of the judiciary- part of a long term conspiracy by
hard rightist lawyers in the Federalist Society, the GOP, and the top echelon
of the corporate oligarchy. Lewis Powell, that corporate lawyer also put on the
Supreme Court by the unholy alliance of Democratic and Republican Senators, wrote
a memo before his ascension to Infallible Justice that was a clarion call
mobilizing the reactionary corporate elite in this endeavor.

Meanwhile “liberals” mostly vote for these hard right wing
nominees, only occasionally putting on a show of pseudo-resistance when the
people they need to con raise a fuss. I say “pseudo-resistance” because they
never go beyond “expressions of concern” and voting against, knowing full well
the votes are there to confirm- unless they actually want to block by, say
filibustering, or putting a hold on nominees. (Only takes one Senator to put a
hold on. I’m not sure if that is “allowed” for Supreme Court nominees, as is
commonly done with other executive branch nominees that some reactionary in the
Senate doesn’t like, or occasionally for purposes of extorting legislative
favors or money for their state’s business interests.)

The other thing “liberals” do is tell the chumps who they want to
vote Democratic every four years that the sky is about to fall if the GOP wins
the Presidency and appoints more Justices.

Take, for example, The
Nation magazine. The cover, and most of the issue dated October 8th
was devoted to the “the Supreme Court hangs in the balance with this election!”
line of propaganda. The issue harps on the pro-big corporate bias of the Court-
as if the Democratic Party isn’t a
pro-big corporate Party. One dishonest article entitled “How The Right Packed
The Court” completely ignored all the help the “Right” got from the Democrats in packing it.3

This article is a good example of how something can be accurate
factually yet present a false picture of reality. By omitting the Democrats’
role, the article does not provide readers with the information they need to
understand fully the cause of the problem, and certainly guarantees NO
SOLUTION, EVER, as the implication (explicated elsewhere) is that the solution
is to elect Democrats to the White House. I think reality and experience has
conclusively proven that is NOT the solution. That is a guarantee to remain
mired in an oppressive system with no escape route.

The Nation magazine crowd are Democratic Party
cowboys. Cowboys in the sense of what actual cowboys do. Their job is to herd progressives into the Democratic
Party corral, to keep lefties politically
penned up inside the Democratic Party’s
fence, ideologically confused and politically neutralized so as not to pose any
possible threat to the system of power. And these cunning political cowpokes roughly
round up strays who are tempted to actually vote for people who want to change
things, such as a Nader (who the Nationites
savagely attacked for having the effrontery to think he had a right to run for
President), or any Green or Socialist or whatever alternative. Just as cattle rustlers
steal cattle, Nader was accused of “stealing” Democratic votes. (Guess you
didn’t know you were the Property of the Democratic Party! Maybe they should brand us!)

Leftists are supposed to just dutifully go to the polls every 2 or
4 years and participate in the staged elections by voting for the Democratic
head of the two-headed beast, validating the “democratic” legitimacy of the
two-party corporate dictatorship we (and a lot of other people all around the
world, in effect) exist under. Anyone
who is serious about pro-human change in the world has to become a conscious
enemy of the system. That’s certainly how the system treats all progressives
anyway. The secret police explicitly designates left of center dissidents as “terrorists.”
Obama has sicced the Federal prosecutors around the country on activists,
including in Seattle and Chicago. The FBI and the entire panoply of repressive
organs of the state behaves no differently towards people who challenge the
corporate status quo under Democratic regimes than under Republican ones. Fake
progressives epitomized by The Nation
are a sophisticated technique for neutralizing potential threats to the system,
NOT vehicles for change, regardless of their usefulness as information sources.

1)Remember something called Bush v. Gore?
The bourgeoisie prefer that you don’t remember it, since stolen elections
contradict their main propaganda themes- that the U.S. is the epitome of
democracy. Of course, lots of things contradict that, like the fact that for
most of U.S. history most adults were legally barred from voting. Or that there
was a coup in 1963 in which the CIA, in league with the FBI and military,
assassinated the President of the U.S., with “the” media acting as accessories
after the fact to this day.

The only reference to Florida 2000 you ever get from “the” media
these days is “hanging chads,” an extremely misleading meme. Lately we have
learned from Greg Palast that the ballots were deliberately manufactured with
the chads mispositioned so they would not be properly punched out.

Anyway, the Democrats and their cowboys blame their loss in 2000
on Ralph Nader. If only he hadn’t run, the GOP and Florida Governor Jeb Bush and
his gang wouldn’t have arranged to steal Florida, and their 5 operatives on the
Supreme Court wouldn’t have blocked a recount! Nader caused all that! And Al Gore would have won his home state of
Tennessee! And Gore and the Democrats would
have objected to the brazen, racist disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of
black voters! And the DemocraticSupervisor of Elections for Palm Beach County, Theresa LePore, who designed a ballot
that duped thousands of elderly Jews into voting for notorious anti-Semite
Patrick Buchanan (much to that fascist’s amusement) wouldn’t have done that except for Ralph Nader! And “the”
media wouldn’t have been blatantly biased against Gore throughout the entire
campaign while going easy on former cokehead-alcoholic-war-dodger-National
Guard-no-show Bush! It’s all Nader’s
fault that Gore lost, I tell you!! Can’t you see that?

You see, the “democratic process” can’t work if there are more
than two candidates. It can’t work if anyone tries to challenge the monopoly on
political power held by the two corporate capitalist pro-U.S.-Imperialism
parties! Allowing anyone to run outside the two-party dictatorship would just
lead to anarchy! Why would you want to mess with The World’s Greatest
Democracy? That’s why states make it so incredibly difficult for anyone not
anointed by one of the two (two’s plenty!) parties to even get on a ballot.
That’s why Democratic and Republican politicians pass convoluted, arcane,
voluminous election laws. That’s why their lawyers go to court to get
Democratic and Republican judges to throw people (like Nader) off the ballot,
invalidate their qualifying petitions to get on the ballot, etc. It’s because
they’re so dedicated to democracy and the people’s right to choose “their”
“leaders.” Let’s not be cynical here.

2)The New
York Times ran an editorial October 16th decrying all the
Federal Court vacancies and upbraiding the Republicans for putting their petty
partisan political interests above the Good of the Nation. It makes a passing
reference to the next President possibly making Supreme Court appointments. It
also briefly mentions Obama’s “slowness” in even nominating judges to the Judiciary. How diffident, passive, and
Hamlet-like our Assassin-in-Chief can be about some things! Undecisive!

3)No surprise that the Democrats’ crucial
role in the court-packing wasn’t mentioned at all. First, it’s in TheNation,
an organ put out by Democratic Party stooges, and second, it was penned by one
William Yeomans, whose background is given in a footnote as a former chief
counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy, a former “Justice” Dept. apparatchik who
spent 26 years there, a legal director of something called “Alliance for
Justice,” a program director at the “American Constitution Society,” and
currently a “fellow in law and government” at American University. (Busy
fellow! He must be very talented! Or considered politically reliable.) In short, this is a man steeped in
Democratic Party politics. I wouldn’t expect a former chief counsel to the “liberal
lion” Kennedy to say anything uncomplimentary about Democratic Senators, would
you?

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

One thing the U.S. knows how to do is
“make economies scream” (in the notorious words of Nixon, giving
Richard Helms, CIA gestapo boss, his marching orders on Chile in
1970, being told by his leader to “make the economy scream,”
according to Helms' notes of a meeting with Nixon). It's done it to
Iraq, it's been trying to do it with some success to Cuba for 50
years, and now it's doing it to Iran. The Iranian currency just
plunged 50% in a week, and is continuing to plunge. A full-fledged
currency panic and loss of confidence is in train. (You see, “Bibi”
Netanyahu? All We Are Saaay-ing, Is Give Sanctions A
Chance.)

An Iranian rial will now get you an
American dollar- or rather, 37,000 rials will buy you a buck.
That's a lot more than the 24,600 rials it would have cost you a week
ago. The rial is down over 80% year to date. (Talk about Weimar
Germany-style inflation and currency debasement! I hope the Iranians
stocked up on wheelbarrows already- the U.S. Is probably getting set
to embargo those too. Maybe the U.S. will let some wooden barrels
through so Iranians will have something to cover themselves with when
their clothes wear out.)

Of course, the question that is never
asked or answered in the U.S. media is: what if Iran says “uncle”
and knuckles under to U.S.-led demands? The assumption the gullible
U.S. public is allowed to believe is that then sanctions will be
lifted. Not so. There's a propaganda technique at work here, that I
called Deception by Omission.

The “offer” on the table from the
U.S. Is this: Iran, shut down and demolish the Fordow uranium
enrichment site (the one that's under a mountain that our bombs can't
destroy), and hand over ALL your enriched uranium, and then MAYBE
we'll EASE the sanctions.

I kid you not. That's the U.S. “offer”
on hand.

Now maybe that's just a hardball
negotiating position, to give the U.S. some bargaining room. But then
there's the matter of U.S. Law.

As the latest rounds of sanctions was
passed by Congress at the end of July, various Congresspeople
stipulated that in order for the sanctions to be lifted, not only
does Iran have to completely dismantle its nuclear program, it must
also let its people vote the mullahs out of power i.e. Congress is
demanding regime change to lift the sanctions- and abandon Hezbollah
and Hamas, i.e. give Israel a totally free hand to do with them as it
wishes. It's called “The Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human
Rights Act of 2012.” Funny title. “Accountability” of course is
U.S. Imperialist code for “we're gonna make you pay for crossing
us.” And the chest beating putative concern for the human rights of
Iranians is just ludicrous, on many grounds, but I'll mention just
two in passing: 1) the sanctions hurt the Iranian people most of all,
and 2) the U.S. Imposed a brutal dictatorship on Iran from 1953 to
1979, during which a quarter of a million Iranians were killed, the
CIA mentored the world's most savagely torturing secret police, the
SAVAK, and Amnesty International branded the Shah's regime the worst
violator of human rights in the world- which is quite something,
considering the competition.

You
see, until the Iranians “come clean on their nuclear program, end
the suppression of their people and stop supporting terrorist
activities, they will face deepening international isolation and even
greater economic and diplomatic pressure,” Senator Tim Johnson,
Democrat of South Dakota, said.
(AP, 7/31/12, in NY Times, “DealStruck to Tighten Sanctions Against Iran.”)

And the
always execrable Florida Republican RepresentativeIleana
Ros-Lehtinen, who sponsored the bill in the House, brayed that the
latest law attacking Iran“blacklists
virtually all of Iran’s energy, financial and transportation
sectors, and cuts off companies that keep doing business with Iran
from access to our markets in the United States.”
This Stateswoman heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (Oh,
here's a surprise- she really really hates the Castro regime in Cuba.
No, really, she does.)

Our
good Congresspeople also wanted to punish the directors and
shareholders of Swift, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunications, which handles interbank transactions, unless they
stop providing services to the Central Bank of Iran, thus cutting
Iran off entirely from the world financial system. (The official,
aboveground system anyway.) They didn't go that far- yet.

But
maybe they don't really mean it. After all, it barely squeaked
through the House by 421-6.

At
the time the bill passed. Binyamin (his actual name) Netanyahu and
current War Secretary and lifelong apparatchik Leon Panetta (his last
gig was overseeing assasinations at the CIA) stood shoulder to
shoulder and jointly issued a bellicose statement telling Iran that
“time is running out” and other threatening language.

Of
course, this is all about power, and the desire to prevent Iran under
its current regime from acquiring more leverage in the region, NOT
about a threat to Israel's survival. The Iranian mullahs aren't the
mindless fanatics the Taliban are, nor are they like suicidal car
bombers. They know what would happen if they launched a nuclear
attack on Israel. (It would take them years to develop miniaturized
warheads that can be carried on missiles, and to build enough
missiles to penetrate Israel's anti-missile defenses, plus Israel has
an arsenal of several hundred warheads, and by the way, Israel's
backer the U.S. has thousands of nuclear weapons, and for icing on
the cake, Britain and France also have nuclear arsenals, and are
allies of Israel.)

So here's how the propaganda technique, of misleading the
public by omission, what I call Deception By Omission, works. You
bury the crucial facts in the fine print and let the blaring trumpets
and pounding drums drown out the whispers of critical information. Of
course, people who go over printed media with a magnifying glass
every day, and recall the one-time mentions of significant facts, and
recognize their importance, AND remember them, aren't fooled. But
everyone else is. We can't say “the media” didn't report it. See,
they reported it! (Some did, anyway, one time.) But it's hardly the
impression that's conveyed by the deluge of “coverage” we are fed
on this issue. (And others as well.)

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Looks like Obama will win in November, barring GOP electoral theft as they committed in 2000 (Florida) and 2004 (Ohio). Obama owes Mother Jones big time for unearthing a video of Romney's secret meeting with rich scum like himself, who paid $50,000 apiece to hear Romney regale them with their own class bigotry, which Romney shares to his core, and his utterly reactionary foreign policy "views."

Nice to have confirmation of the obvious: that Romney is typical of his class, a class that has contempt for the masses. He and his ilk view us as parasites on "wealth creators" like himself. No wonder these scum love Ayn Rand.

In the wake of this video, which has gotten establishment media play for more than one "news cycle" (a day), Obama is opening a lead in the polls, now at 8%, supposedly the largest lead for a candidate at this point before a Presidential election since 1996.

Of course, Obama will have no gratitude for progressives. Leftists in America who slavishly support the Democratic Party suffer from a severe case of Political Abused Wife Syndrome. The Democrats abuse leftists year after year, and each election year promise that this time things will be different. Desperate, and trapped, feeling she has nowhere to go, the wife (Left) never leaves the abuser.
Same story with unions and the Democrats.

The Democrats consistently do absolutely nothing for labor and progressives, in fact actively attack their interests. The Obama regime protects the Colombian bourgeoisie's murder of unionists, which is ongoing despite a cynical ploy in this year's "free trade" deal with Colombia, hailed by Obama, which Obama claims assures environmental and labor protections. (The Colombian death squad ruling class continues to murder unionists as this is written.)

Regarding progressives, if the vituperative contempt directed at them by the likes of Jim Messina (Obama's thuggish campaign manager) Jay Carney (the smarmy WH press secretary) and the vulgar obscenity-screamer Rahm Emanuel is not evidence enough of leftists' masochism, there's the Obama regime's record of increased domestic oppression of progressive dissent. Examples: nationally-coordinated repression of the Occupy Movement; persecution and imprisonment for Tim deChristopher; FBI raids on homes pf peace activists and Grand Jury inquisitions directed at them; refusal to release "cleared" Gitmo prisoners; signing the law, put forth by "liberal" Democratic Senator Carl Levin, giving Presidents the power to imprison Americans for life in the military gulag by merely labeling them "terrorist," a law the Obama regime is vigorously defending in court against legal challenge, despite his "promise" not to use it; personally choosing people for assassination; and on and on.

When you support your persecutor, you have a serious case of masochism.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

You have to carefully monitor the enemy's publications, because sometimes significant information is slipped in.

For example, the June 25, 2012 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology, a trade rag for the military-industrial complex and to a lesser extent the commercial aviation industry, had an article under the heading "Defense" [sic] titled "Bombing Iran: U.S. military planners ponder when a kinetic attack might make sense."
["Kinetic attack" is a euphemism for attacking with bombs, missiles, bullets, etc., as opposed to "cyberwarfare," for example. In other words, directly killing people and blowing stuff up.] The story is illustrated with a photo of a B-2 Stealth Bomber dropping a string of bombs. It goes over the outlook from the perspectives of U.S. and Israeli imperialists, enumerates in minute detail the various weapons that would be used [e.g. "Lockheed Martin F-22s upgraded for the use of independently targeted, ripple-fired GBU-39 small-diameter bombs, which are designed to destroy or suppress enemy air defenses," and "The AGM-158 Jassm-ER," the kind of jargon weapons fetishists must drool over] quotes the U.S. ambassador to Israel saying the U.S. is ready to attack, and so on. Cyber and electronic attack were also mentioned as components of a direct military attack on Iran.

But what stood out to me was paragraph 15, which stated:

"A worrisome issue for U.S. planners is that Iran also has intelligence allies. Syria's surveillance
and air defense radars, command-and-control (C2) and sigint [jargon for signals intelligence, the interception of communication signals] organizations share information with Tehran. Any attack against Iran would likely have to travel over Turkey north of Syria, over Jordan and Saudi Arabia to the south, or directly over Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Any of those routes would require electronic or kinetic attack of Syrian radar, communications and C2 centers - some of which are in Lebanon - to hide the approaching force. Alternatively, the fall of Syria's current
government could provide enough chaos to camouflage a raid on Iran." [My italics.]

While they're at it, they'll probably bomb the "terrorist" Hezbollah in Lebanon, despised enemy of Israel and seen as a cat's paw of Iran.

ANY of the routes to attack Iran would REQUIRE bombing Syria and Lebanon, they said.

On the magazine's website, the article is split into 3 pages. Here's the link to the third page, which has the paragraph in question.

Thursday, September 06, 2012

That's what he claims. Odd thing is,
the $ media practically ignored this biographical revelation. I'm
sure they must be familiar with the content of that band, being the
alert ideological watchdogs that they are.

Rage Against The Machine was a radical,
anti-capitalist band that explicitly attacked the
exploitative system of oppression enforced by the U.S. They even
targeted specific U.S. corporations by name in the song “Wind
Below”on the Evil
Empire album. (And the empire
they meant wasn't the U.S.S.R.!) They also cursed a lot. The
dyed-in-the-wool capitalists I know hate RATM.

Ryan saying he's a fan of RATM is like
Adolf Hitler revealing that in his spare time he liked to dance the
hora. It's really rather stunning. I've have thought Ted Nugent would
be more his cup of tea. Or a gay-basher like Axl Rose.

What is he, a closet commie?

Isn't someone like Ryan supposed to
enjoy, oh, I don't know, country and western, or gospel, or maybe
Lawrence Welk? (Ok that was a low blow. How about The Eagles then?)

Ryan was made to do a bit of squirming
over the fact that his intellectual lodestar, Ayn Rand, was an
atheist. The media made sure to bring that up. But liking RATM
is no problem? It's not just a brand of beer, bourgeoisie!

Saturday, August 25, 2012

This time about Lance Armstrong. During all the hype about his winning the Tour de France 7 times, I never believed it was possible without cheating. I figured he must be using illegal drugs. Turns out my natural skepticism was justified.

I've been right so many times over the years about things great and small that others were blind to. The fact that James O'Keefe was going to get off scot-free after being caught in the act of trying to tap the phones in the U.S. Senator's office, for example.

Or to take an example from some years back, I always loathed that phony choir, "Up With People." Cloying bullshit like that always fills my nostrils with the stench of sanctimonious hypocrisy. In that case, it turned out that they were secretly backed by one of the most evil, mass murdering organizations in [pre-] human history, the CIA.

Too bad few people are interested in seeing reality the way it really is. It is painful to do so, given the subhuman, indeed in many ways anti-human state of the world. (Not the Armstrong example- that's small beer.)

Thursday, August 02, 2012

For an electricity blackout, that is. 22 of 28 states, 720 million people deprived of power. Wow! That's impressive.

You have to wonder, why with all the hype about India's faaa-bulous economic "development," no one thought to prepare for increased electricity demand.

Actually the blackout was all the farmers' fault. You see, thanks to an absence of rain, those crazy farmers all turned on irrigation pumps so their crops wouldn't die. What were they thinking! Those pumps are just for decoration, not actual use.

Here's a quote I found noteworthy:

"India has more poor people than all of Africa combined." -Gardner Harris, NY Times New Delhi correspondent , speaking on NPR news, 8/1/12, Morning Edition.

Somehow the capitalist Panglossians who spew the economic hype about "emerging economies" never mention facts like that.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

You pretty much have to go to foreign media to find out that India is calling for an investigation of the U.S. Navy's attack on a small Indian fishing boat. You won't know from U.S. media that India has a beef. (India is just some unimportant country anyway, with a tiny population of only one billion one hundred million people.) You won't know that the dead fisherman has left behind a grieving wife, if you get your "information" from the U.S. media.

Aljazeera is now reporting that the boat was 500 meters from the U.S. ship when it was lethally fired on.

The U.S. media is still blacking out the fact that the U.S. Navy ship blithely, indifferently sailed away from its victims after machine-gunning them.

There apparently is no need for apologies, or regrets, much less compensation. Since this story, after one day, is being virtually blacked out by the U.S. media, tossed down the memory hole, we don't have to think about it anymore.

Being the World's Only Superpower means never having to say you're sorry.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

U.S. and lackey U.K. media are already parroting (without doing any investigating) the U.S. Navy's version of why it shot up an Indian fishing boat off the coast of Dubai.

The USN claims a small boat was charging straight at it, ignored "repeated" warnings, including warning shots, and that the Navy had no choice but to fire a machine gun at the boat, killing one and wounding several more people.

For one thing, the Aljazeera article is centered around the Indian Government's call for an investigation and contacting the U.S. Government.

There's no mention of this in the "Western" story.

Aljazeera also did something very strange- they actually interviewed the survivors from the fishing boat. The survivors claim that there were no warning shots. Aljazeera also gives details omitted from the Western media version about what the other "warnings" were- broadcasts on radio in loudspeaker (in Indian? probably not!) and flashing lights. So you're supposed to know that "flashing lights" means "run for you life!"

Another significant detail omitted by Western media- the fishing boat was 8 km away when the Navy opened lethal fire. And this is what the U.S. Navy said, so we see a deliberate cover-up already by the swine at the NY Times et al. We're not exactly talking imminent danger here.

One more telling detail, kept secret by the Imperialist press: after shooting up the fishing boat, the U.S. Navy craft just sailed away. The victims were on their own. (Isn't that always the case for victims of the U.S.? That's just standard operating procedure.)

The New York Times, while not bothering to mention any of this, did have plenty of space to rehash the U.S.S. Cole bombing in Aden harbor (which occurred over a decade ago). And to stoke paranoia about Iranian patrol boats and Iranian belligerence [sic] generally. (By the way, Hillary Clinton is in Israel to conspire against Iran right now.) This is a sleazy way to justify in a backhanded way the murder of the Indian fisherman, by referencing the attack on the Cole. With a similar logic, one can justify shooting black men in the U.S. by police since some black men are armed criminals! Hey, there's a little boat. A little boat once blew a hole in a U.S. ship. Better open fire! (Just as U.S. cops make the streets of American dangerous places, so the U.S. Navy makes the world's seas dangerous places.)

While dredging up the Cole incident, the NYT said nothing about the murderous U.S. Navy shootdown of that Iranian civilian airliner during the Reagan regime, however. Some things must never be forgotten, and some things must never be remembered. This is called "objective journalism."

Thursday, July 05, 2012

We can identify a number of accomplices in the murder of Yasser Arafat. Of course Israel.

But it almost certainly was a Palestinian who put the polonium 210 in Arafat's food. As far as we know, no one else was sickened. So it would have had to be someone in Arafat's immediate circle.

This highlights a sad truth: that among oppressed peoples, there are always those who aid their people's oppressors. It was true when the Jews were being annihilated by the Nazis. It was true among blacks in apartheid South Africa. It was true in Northern Ireland, as the British had great success infiltrating the IRA, even at its highest levels.

And it's certainly been true among Palestinians. The Israeli secret police agencies (Shin Bet and Mossad primary among them) are quite competent in their dirty work.

We have learned from Aljazeera (the two-part 51 minute video program especially) that Egypt and France are accomplices, at a minimum as accessories after the fact. The Egyptian doctors who tried to treat Arafat were ordered to keep their mouths shut by the military rulers, we learned from Aljazeera, which tried to interview them for its investigation. Thirty French doctors Aljazeera contacted all stone-walled the inquiry. The French also made sure to destroy Arafat's body fluids in their possession a few years after his murder. This was done secretly- it was only learned when Aljazeera tried to obtain them for testing.

Now his widow Suha is calling for Arafat's body to be exhumed for testing. The "Palestinian Authority" (U.S.-Israeli stooge Palestinian "leadership") is saying "fine" to this. Specifically, the two head flunkies of their people's oppressors, "President" (of a non-existent state) Mahmoud Abbas and former head "negotiator" with the Israelis Saeb Erekat, both have come out publicly saying they agree with this. (Erekat's brief interview on Aljazeera was quite revealing in terms of his body language and facial expressions. It's obvious he's not at all happy with this turn of events. He's even shaking his head "no" at one point while saying Yes to exhumation. He even gets tongue-tied towards the end and becomes semi-incoherent, trying to make sentences out of fragments of boilerplate rhetoric he keeps stored in his brain.)

To refresh your memory on Erekat's and Abbas' attempt to surrender to Israel, which Netanyahu rejected as not enough, since apparently it didn't include all the land to the Jordan River and a Palestinian promise to march their people into the sea, see "Palestine Papers: The Secret Negotiations."

Oh, one more accomplice needs to be mentioned. The New York Times. Their first reaction to Aljazeera's great expose was to run a short, despicable piece full of disinfo, dishonesty, and disingenuousness, by one Rick Gladstone. ("Al Jazeera Says Arafat Might Have Been Poisoned, 7/3/12.) But what can you expect from motherfuckers who still promote the absurd Warren Commission lies? The NYT is a political propaganda rag above all else, masquerading as a newspaper.Just look how they kept secret the NSA domestic spying story for a year and a half because the Bush regime wanted them to? Among innumerable other examples. Like the "Pope Plot." And "Yellow Rain." And a story they once ran about 8 people permanently blinding themselves by staring at the sun on an acid trip- totally fictitious, just like the previous two examples I mentioned. They even fabricated the Kitty Genovese murder story. That was exposed on On the Media.

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Aljazeera conducted a nine-month investigation to try and determine the cause of Yasser Arafat's death. His widow Suha gave them a copy of his extensive medical dossier, and his personal effects, on which was discovered the poloniium 210 that killed him. In a 51 minute video in two parts posted on Aljazeera's website, they detail the events surrounding his death and the medical forensic inquiry undertaken by Aljazeera.

Shortly before the hit was undertaken, various Israeli officials made threats against Arafat, including then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who publicly revoked his promise not to murder Arafat, and then Minister of "Communications" Ehud Olmert, who explicitly threatened Arafat's life.

The gang of Western-Israeli stooge Palestinians in the top echelon of the PLO were already maneuvering to seize the spoils before Arafat was even dead. Until his condition was critical, the medical care provided by the Palestinians themselves was oddly indifferent and inept. After his death, his successors showed no interest in getting to the bottom of what happened.

Since he suddenly became violently ill 4 hours after eating, we can presume that the polonium was planted in his food. Polonium is well known to cause severe gastrointestinal symptoms.

So now there's yet another reason for "the West" to hate Aljazeera. Guess the U.S. will have to kill some more of their reporters. Maybe they'll poison them this time instead of bombing them, to "send a message," as gangsters like to say.

The polonium 210 used to murder Yasser Arafat came from a nuclear reactor. That much has been established by Swiss scientists. Of course the particular reactor would be either in Israel or the U.S. The radioactive signature of the polonium which could be recovered from Arafat's bones in an autopsy could possibly point to the specific source, according to Aljazeera. ["Arafat's widow calls to exhume his body," aljazeera.com]

Following Arafat's demise, his secret police killers made sure to spread rumors about causes of his death to cover their tracks. One of those rumors played into Arab homophobia, claiming he died of AIDS. Nice. First the physical assassination, then the character assassination. (Of course Arafat was subject to vilification during his lifetime too, for daring to use violence in his people's cause, the same as Ben Gurion, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, and all the general-Prime Ministers of Israel. They should try nonviolence! Well, they do, and have, at least since 1967, and today. The Israeli response to Palestinian protests is consistent: violence repression, arrests, imprisonment without trial of "protest leaders," and so forth. So can the pseudo-Gandhian lectures, bourgeoisie. By the way, Martin Luther King, Jr. preached nonviolence, and his payback was to be shot down by the CIA. I love when some of the most violent gangsters in world history preach nonviolence to the people they oppress.)

This was obvious to me even before he died, when he came down with a "mystery illness." Then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was publicly kicking himself for dealing with Arafat, and the Israelis declared there could be no "progress" in the "peace process" as long as Arafat was on the scene. They and the U.S. decided that a more pliable Palestinian "leader" was needed. (Mahmoud Abbas has indeed proven more pliable, aiding Israeli assassinations within his West Bank quasi-Bantustan, and making secret, exorbitant concessions to Netanyahu, which Netanyahu rejects since he is pursuing the long range Israeli strategy, in place since 1967, of ultimately absorbing most or all of the territory between the 1967 Israeli border and the Jordan river.)

Now Aljazeera has revealed that Arafat was murdered with polonium-210, from a nuclear reactor. Irony of ironies, this is the exact same radioactive substance the Russians used to murder Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. ["Tests hint at possible Arafat poisoning," an entirely too cautious headline, given the definitive content of the story, in video and print on Aljazeera's website.]

The CIA and Mossad wired Arafat's encourage with infiltrators years ago, so slipping polonium into him presented no great challenge. Swiss lab analysts hired by Aljazeera discovered polonium 210 on his clothes and toothbrush. (A microscopic amount is enough to be lethal.)

Conveniently, no autopsy was performed on Arafat. Muslim custom blocks autopsies. And the French were providing Arafat's medical "care." The French are no friends of the Palestinian people.

For years Israelis in the "security establishment" mooted the possibility of murdering Arafat. Veterans of the Israeli military and secret police spoke ruefully of missed opportunities to eliminate Arafat, which their political superiors considered not in Israel's interests at the times. Sharon kicked himself for not murdering Arafat earlier.

Add another one to the list of stunning Western hypocrisies. The Western propaganda system never tires of taxing the Russians with Litvinenko's murder. These Americans and their Euro-stooges are OH SO CIVILIZED. They find it SHOCKING that anyone would assassinate somebody!